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Former Governor of Anambra State, Mr. Peter Obi (left), Archbishop Emmanuel Chukwuma (middle), and other Bishops, welcoming the Primate, Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, Most Rev. Dr. Nicholas Okoh (right) to the dedication of Legacy Building at the Trinity Theological College, Umuahia, Abia State

If you are encountering difficulties and you try to use any strategy other than that which is available in the word of God to solve these difficulties, it will lead to disaster. Moving away from the presence of God or from His word will only compound your problems; there are strategies for victory for all of us and they can be found in the word of God.

1 Kings 20:21-22 reads, “Then the king of Israel went out and attacked the horses and chariots, and killed the Syrians with great slaughter. And the prophet came to the king of Israel and said to him, ‘Go, strengthen yourself; take note, and see what you should do, for in the spring of the year, the king of Syria will come up against you.” The Lord told the king of Israel that the same Syrians he had just defeated were still going to come back and that if he wanted to defeat them the next time they went to battle, he had to remember what he did to gain this victory. The victory that they obtained was not by coincidence but was based on certain actions that they took. For each victory in battle recorded by the children of Israel, they had first sought God’s guidance.

Whenever they were defeated, it was because they had not consulted God. Their strategy for victory was therefore to seek God’s face before they fought any battle. A powerful man with no strategy will always be defeated by a man with less power but with a strategy for victory. The Bible is, therefore telling us that if we are going to defeat our defeat, we have to have strategies in place or our enemies will defeat us.

How do we obtain strategies for victory? In Romans 4:23-24, we read about the account of Abraham, “Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.” This means that Abraham’s story was not just written for history’s sake alone if we are but was written so that if we are able to do what Abraham did, we too shall obtain the same blessing. The biblical examples have been presented so that we can learn from them, emulate the actions of those who were successful and thereby gain success in our own lives. In the case of Job and Joseph, the following are the strategies they adopted to defeat their defeat.

No matter what you are going through, you must always maintain your relationship with God. In Job 1:21, Job said, “Naked I come from my mother’s womb, and naked there I shall return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” If you want to defeat your defeat, make sure your relationship with God is intact. Both Job and Joseph refused to sin against God, while in Job 1:22 the Bible says, in spite of all that Job went through, he sinned not.
Pastor Ogunorunyinka is the General Overseer, The Promised Land Restoration Ministries, Solution Ground, Surulere, Lagos.

The trial of your faith will come when things are not working the way you want them to; the manner in which you react in such a situation determines the type of relationship you will eventually have with God. When Joseph rejected the temptation of Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:4-9, he did so not because of the fear of his master, but because of the fear of God. In verse 9 Joseph said,

“How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”
Joseph and Job valued their relationship with God far above their problems. Some of us place our problems above God; the problems that we are facing determine if we go to church or not, if we pray or not. Every time you refuse to do something because of what you are going through, you are telling God that he is below your problems. In the case of Job and Joseph, they moved from grace to grass yet they refused to bow down to sin. How many Christians will do this? The true test of your Christianity is not when God is blessing you, but when nothing seems to be going right in your life. How steadfast will you be? Anyone can praise God but how many can worship Him? True worship is praising God in the midst of nothing. As believers, we may go through trials and tribulations but they are not enough to take us away from the presence of God.